Marriage and s*x

Admin: This discussion has been split. It began with Sushuri- chei writing:

Honored Elefarya-chei, I think this is an area where even more racinated Telluria differs from the Motherland, since marriage has always been considered to be the vocation of almost everyone, where in the Motherland it is not. Also romance seems to be mostly linked to marriage or potential marriage, whereas in the Motherland it is very often not and is very often same-sex without any notion of “gayness”. We don’t have that notion, of course.

The idea of marriage as something that ought to happen is common in more racinated places in Telluria (such as Japan), and I think the idea of being “ace” would be rather puzzling to older Japanese people who would probably ask “But what does that have to do with not getting married?”

I am sure their puzzlement would be equally puzzling to West Telluri. They have no idea how their quite historically recent notion of “s*x” is not universal because it really has erased everything else for them.

Increasing numbers of younger people in Japan do seem to be “ace” though. They do not marry, and extramarital nonsense really hardly happens. The phenomenon has become a “worrying topic” in Japan. So like the West Telluria, there is some (but not so much) disruption in traditional norms in this area – but it is taking a very different form.

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Oh, that is so interesting, Sushuri-chei, what you said about older Japanese people pondering why being an “ace” would make any difference to whether one would get married. When I was thinking of my Motherland waftings on the matter, I have to admit that being an “ace” did not occur to me as a reason that a maid would be seen to not have the vocation of marriage. The most common reasons that I remember would be of the nature of a blonde being a bit too blonde to manage a household and children, a brunette having too much of a wandering spirit to support and protect a household, or the maid clearly having a vocation that would make marriage awkward. As you say, though, the vocation of marriage was not expected at all in the way it is in Telluria.

Of course, it was very rare that an unmarried maid would live alone. In North Arkadya, maids (married and unmarried) would live with extended family either in the same household or very close by. In the city, maids might also live in dormitories adjacent to the Guildhouses or with their Amity Group.

I suppose the thing in the Tellurian past is that some people saw s*x as splendid fringe benefit of marriage. Some saw it as one of the more unfortunate necessities of life, like colds or montly troubles (Queen Victoria’s private advice to her daughters, for example, assumes this). Some men were privately obsessed with it (pornography did exist) and many men used it as an occasional recreation (prostitution did exist) – but no one saw it as a thing of great importance in itself. And certainly no one saw it as a “need” or as something central to one’s identity.

The results of the act were important. Its status in the ritual of marriage was important (an unconsummated marriage was taken to be ritually incomplete and could be anulled). But the act itself did not even have a convenient term like “s*x” (coined in the second half of the 1920s by a radical advocate of the new attitudes) and certainly not one that, like “s*x”, combined the procreative act itself with any simulation of it – making the sensation of the act central to its definition and essentilaly bringing into the mainstream the perspective of the pornography addict.

The change was very closely bound up with the change to viewing humans as fundamentally animals, and thus radically changing the whole “mythos” of what this act actually was and where it stood in the scheme of human life.

I am sorry to bring up all this sordid Tellurian business, but I thought it might be a contribution to what we mean when we say “the concept of “s*x” is a historically recent” – a term which , to modern Tellurians who can imagine nothing else, is probably incomprehensible.

Also of course Chelouranyans are not recommending former Tellurian attitudes to the subject. Herthelan attitudes are different again.

Thank you, honored Miss Charis, for this excellent summary. I think this makes the Tellurian side of the matter much clearer.

Where you say:

The change was very closely bound up with the change to viewing humans as fundamentally animals, and thus radically changing the whole “mythos” of what this act actually was and where it stood in the scheme of human life.

I would take the liberty of amplifying this by saying the the traditional Tellurian view of what the procreative act actually is is that its essence lies in its ritual status. After the rationalist revolution this view gradually weakened and had become somewhat vestigial by the 19th century, but it was still the cultural basis of the human understanding of the nature of the act, which is why it continued to be surrounded by “taboos”.

These “taboos” were seen as irrational by “advanced” thinkers because they were remnants of an older way of thinking which revolutionary rationalism had discarded since revolutionary rationalism views the world as entirely material and discards ritual considerations as “unreal”. However before the pseudomythos, even West Telluria’s “image sphere” or “mythic ground” remained rooted in the older way of seeing things.

This changed rapidly after the spread of the pseudomythos which, made it possible in all areas for the logical implications of the rationalist revolution to be fully realized in the cultural sphere. It also incidentally opened the door to the tamasic or post-modernist phase, since when the rationalist revolution was complete, all protection against the inferior psychic domain had been finally eliminated.

In the area we are discussing it made the modern concept of “s*x” possible, with all the ramifications that we see in current (particularly West) Telluria.

What you say about the ritual nature of the act is very interesting, Honored Lady Aquila, and it helps to explain why an unconsummated marriage could be annulled. In the U.S., until around the mid 19th Century, legally a married couple was seen as a unit rather than two separate people. Marriage was really seen as two people becoming one, which is why married people were not able to sue each other, because that would be seen as a bit of an absurdity, as how could someone sue oneself? That fits with the ritual nature of the act making two people one.

That started to change in the mid 1800’s with the Married Women’s Property Acts, which allowed married women to own property in their own right. The feminist movement cites femini not having the right to own property as one of the ways that they were oppressed, and that could very well be…patriarchy is a rather unkind system in many ways. On the other hand, this was also very much tied in with the notion that a married couple was a unit, not two individuals. Unmarried femini and widows always had control of their own property.

The Motheland actually has rather less in the way of “taboo” than Telluria. It may be because even before the rationalist revolution Telluri (mainly masculi) were a bit obsessive about the procreative act.

On the other hand I have to say that the very strong “taboo” nature is a particularly Abrahamic and Teutonic thing. Japan, for example is much less taboo-minded in this area. West Telluria seems to have a strong desire to tell people what not to do, which I think is probably the other side of the coin from their katte-niattitudes. When genuine taboos dissolve they seem to feel impelled to replace them with trivial and artificial ones, such as the grim-faced demonization of smoking.

In Japan, for example, there is no particular taboo against “gayness”. Very few people think it is bad or wrong (significantly, when yuri manga want to make a taboo-based storyline, they tend to set it in one of the small minority of Christian schools in Japan*). On the other hand, people who don’t marry are never quite taken seriously as adults.

It is rather as if Japan maintains some of the traditional Tellurian view of marriage while the West, where it maintains anything, mostly clings to negative taboos.

One interesting sideline on this is that I wonder if the pseudomythos is not “super-effective” in West Telluria. It is destructive of the traditional world everywhere, of course, as the completion and crown-jewel of the rationalist revolution, but it is actually especially tailored to the West Tellurian mentality.

It is not only a denial of Essence, but also a myth-story based on the main themes of West Telluria at the time of its promulgation – progressism, competition as the key to growth (the captialist ideology) etc. While East Tellurian nations have been forced to adopt these ideologies, they have not internalized them to the same extent. For example the Japanese approach to business, even now**, is much more 和 harmony and 内 group-loyalty based.

Because the evolutionist pseudomythos is so much a West-Tellurian story-picture I wonder if (to use Pokemon terms) it is effective against East Telluria (when it hits) but super-effective against West Telluria.

Incidentally one of the main reasons for not believing evolution is not even so much the huge evidential flaws as the sheer and improbable coincidence that would be involved in such a clearly West-Tellurian late-19th-Century ideology-story also happening to be the “objective truth” about biological nature.

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*Cf the classic yuri tragedy, Shiroi Heya no Futari

**Despite the fact that the International Monetary Fund has, with some success, attempted to enforce more Western-style business practices (including the de-incentivizing of the employment-for-life policy formerly nearly universal in Japanese companies) as a condition of loan-terms. This is one example of the many ways short of raw firepower (which is used when necessary) that West Telluria uses to force its ideologies on Telluria as a whole.

A thing the Japanese comparison makes clear here is that culture and ideology, not technics are what drive fundamental attitudes and behavior.

Many people in West Telluria have argued that the “sexual revolution” was an inevitable consequence of the invention of reliable contraception. If people could reliably avoid the consequences they would become libertines in large numbers and nothing could stop that.

However, in Japan extramarital impropriety really is very little practised. There is a small degree of break-down (for cultural, not technical reasons), the clearest example of which is that divorce rather than death has become (marginally) the largest cause of single-parent families. Children born out of wedlock form only a tiny percentage. Contrast this with Britain (probably the single most deracinated country in Telluria – being the most deracinated member of the most deracinated – Anglophone – group) where out-of-wedlock births are set to become a majority of all births within two years. Other countries have lesser out-of-wedlock birth rates pretty much proportionate to their degree of deracination.

Not wanting to get into too much Tellurian nonsense, this indicates very clearly that it is not technical possibility which creates fundamental cultural shifts.

The place of Anglophone culture at the extreme edge of Tellurian deracination and the Japanese somewhere toward the other edge may also be an indication of why Japanese (as well as English) is important to the development of the Chelouranyan Protectorate.

Setsuna here. I have been thinking long and hard about this, and while everything our dear sisters have said here about Tellurian cultures and this aspect of life is pretty correct, I think perhaps the Motherland cannot be said to be either the same nor precisely the opposite. The particular aspect of marriage to which we are referring is truly overemphasized in Telluria, but I don’t think it can be said to lack importance. It is a beautiful, holy ritual act within its proper context, especially when untainted by animal theory or patriarchal cruelty.

The best analogy, given the ritual essence, might be the initiation of a priestess. To speak lightly of the initiation of a priestess or to make an imitation of that initiation would be unseemly in the extreme. Not every maid becomes a priestess, and those maids who do become priestesses are chosen for far more important reasons than how well they will go through their initiation. Nor would it be good to become a priestess primarily for the sake of the initiation. However, a maid who saw the initiation of a priestess as a yucky necessity to get over would not be suited to becoming a priestess.

I suppose the thing is that according to that analogy nearly every Telluri femin is expected to be a priestess whether she has a vocation or not. So people who find it yucky end up in that position anyway.

Since this is the way Telluria has always worked (as far as one knows) it does seem a little odd – but they are curious people, I suppose.

Oh, I do not think you are being too forward at all, Honored Miss Chandrick,

I very much agree with what you say about the Motherland. Marriage is much more highly regarded there, I think. At least in North Arkadya, I think divorce is so uncommon as to be almost unheard of. With respect to the particular act in question, I agree wholeheartedly. I do not think it is something we much talk about, though.

I think that the issue of proclivities arises much less there, though. It is a part of life for married people, but I do not think it arises in any other context. Oh dear, I am getting a bit shy about this, I think. In general, we tend to assume we are born into the right kind of life in the Motherland, though. For example, although it happens, it is rare for someone to be born into the wrong Estate. If a maid has a vocation of marriage, I think it would be assumed that she would be able and willing to perform all of the responsibilities of marriage, and to enjoy its privileges.

I do not think that in the Motherland there is so much obsession with it though as there is here in Telluria.